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Digital Media Marketing Is Not A Choice Anymore

Businesses stopped having a choice, a long time back, on whether to adopt digital media marketing or go on with conventional marketing a long time back. It is either digital marketeer or an extinct marketeer. To understand the importance of digital marketing, let’s understand what the world of business looked like prior to the advent of digital marketing. Rather than giving you stats like how many internet/ Facebook/Twitter/ Quora users we have, which are there in abundance on internet, I’ll give you an insight on what you can do with that information for your business.

A Glimpse Into Conventional Marketing

A generation ago, prior to the invasion of computers and mobile devices, our experiences were limited to the offline world. Marketing was all about advertisements in magazines, newspapers, mailings, telemarketing, radio, billboards and television. It is rightly called ‘interruption’ marketing. If you clearly see, the common thread in all of the aforesaid marketing channels is that they are all one way. In conventional marketing, businesses communicated to the potential customer irrespective of whether the customer want to hear about your product or not. It was all advertising clutter. And the scenario was all noisy. Everyone tried to get a customer’s attention. You, as a business, had to reach out to the maximum people out their amongst all that noise in the hope that sooner or later someone would be interested in buying your product or take your service. There was no way you could measure your reach and ROI on your marketing efforts. Sounds difficult to be in business 20 years back?

The New Marketing Landscape

Things changed for good. Our experience landscape changed to online, ever connected world. ‘Internet technologies and social media have enhanced our online experiences.’ We enjoy internet surfing, video, audio and pictures from our laptop screens just as much as we enjoyed it offline. Today our buying decisions are heavily influenced by the opinions and recommendations of our friends and social network online. More than we interact with our friends and family offline, we live with them in the online world. As Mari Smith rightly pointed out, that ‘the gadgets our friends use, the brands they wear encourage us to think positively or negatively about ourselves and others.’

Marketing landscape completely changed with the way people started interacting with each other. With the emergence of internet and plethora of websites, rose the banner advertising business. Sites could now devote a certain amount of space to banners to generate revenue. With Google emerging the most powerful search engine in late 90s, it launched an impression-based advertising business in 2000 and from there evolved the click-through advertising, which is one of the major techniques in digital media marketing till date.

With Google Adwords, click-through advertising, and number of social networks, internet marketing was revolutionized. Overall, digital marketing is the norm of present marketing world and is here to stay.

As a business, you need to think on the lines of how you should formulate a long-term strategy to give digital media, particularly social media a competitive advantage. You would be surprised to know that only 5% of the world’s best brands are doing social media right! So you still have lot to reap.

Benefits of Digital Media Marketing

By now you might have got the idea on how marketing changed over the decades and that you, as a business, need to think seriously on a digital media marketing budget as part of your overall marketing spend.

Let’s quickly look at the benefits of digital media marketing:

1. Wide Reach & Measurement

Consider this: On an average, people spend eight hours of their every day online. And we have three billion users of internet as of 2014 (source: internetlivestats.com)! Imagine the global reach that internet has.

If done right, digital media marketing can do wonders for your business. And you can measure the source of all yours leads and effectiveness of your online campaigns like never before.

2. Greater Customer Appeal

Online marketing gives you a range of options to reach and attract your specific target audience. Your marketing success totally depends on the technique you employ and the budget you spend.

3. Increased Customer Engagement

With digital marketing, you can encourage your prospects to take the action you want them to take unlike before where businesses totally depended on the prospect customer to take the action. It’s a two-way communication.

4. Brand Development

You can develop and manage your brand reputation by taking the right actions to provide value to your customer. Your actions online has direct and immediate impact on the way your business is perceived in public. The ability to monitor online mentions of a company name or particular product or service gives companies the opportunity to respond to negative attitudes, invalidate false humor and separate myth from fact.

5. Cost & ROI

Digital Marketing is one of the most cost effective way of marketing. Reason being – reach and measurement. There is no other form of marketing that can so precisely measure where your leads are coming from and what actions users take when they are on your website. Web analytics help you measure it all .

Here is a graph that clearly shows that inbound marketing costs less than outbound marketing.

Source: Hubspot

It would be equally enriching to know your opinions/experiences/ queries in your comments.